Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But the nations abroad, strangers to all understanding of spiritual powers, furnish the same efficacy to their idols. But they lie to themselves with widowed waters. For they too are initiated by a kind of washing into certain rites of some Isis or Mithras. They even carry out their gods' own funerals with washings. Besides, they purify country houses, town houses, temples, and whole cities by carrying water around and sprinkling it. Certainly at the games of Apollo, and at the Pelusian rites, people are dipped all over the place, and they presume to be doing this for regeneration and for immunity from the penalties of their perjuries. Likewise among the ancients, whoever had stained himself with murder used to go searching for purifying waters. [2] So then, if the idol — through the nature proper to water as a means of washing — flatters people with the auspice of a cleansing, how much more truly will water furnish that through the authority of the God by whom its whole nature was established! If they think waters are medicated by a religious rite, what religion is stronger than the acknowledgment of the living God? [3] Here too we recognize the devil's ambition, aping the things of God, since he too practices baptism among his own. What likeness is there? Does the unclean cleanse? Does the destroyer set free? Does the condemned absolve? He will, of course, be wrecking his own handiwork by washing away sins which he himself breathes into people. These things, indeed, have been set as a testimony against those who reject the faith — that they might believe least of all in the things of God, whose counterfeits they believe in when offered by God's rival. [4] Or is it not also true that elsewhere, without any sacrament at all, unclean spirits brood over waters, aping that original brooding of the divine Spirit? Shadowy springs and out-of-the-way streams are well known for it, and pools in bathhouses, and channels in houses, or cisterns, and wells said to 'snatch' people — through the force, that is, of a harmful spirit. For they call people 'possessed' and 'lymphatic' and 'hydrophobic' when waters have killed them or driven them out of their wits with madness or terror. [5] Why have we brought all this up? So that no one should find it hard to believe that a holy angel of God is present to temper the waters for a man's salvation, when a profane angel of evil so often haunts the commerce of that same element for a man's destruction. If it seems a novelty that an angel intervenes in waters, an example ran ahead as a foretaste of what was to come. An angel, by intervening, used to stir the pool of Bethsaida. Those who suffered from ill health kept watch for it. For if anyone got down into it first, he stopped complaining after the wash. That figure of bodily healing was singing ahead of time of a spiritual healing, following the pattern by which things of the flesh always run ahead, as a figure, of things of the spirit. [6] So then, as the grace of God advanced in all things, still more was added to the waters and the angel: those which used to remedy bodily ailments now heal the spirit; those which used to work a temporary salvation now refashion an eternal one; those which used to set one person free once a year now preserve whole peoples daily, death having been done away with through the washing away of sins. Once the guilt, of course, is removed, the penalty is removed with it. [7] Thus man is restored to God after the likeness of him who had before been made only after his image: the image is reckoned in outward form, the likeness in eternity — for he recovers that very Breath of God, once granted him by God's inbreathing long ago, which sin had afterward stripped away.